More Miccolis

This was a nice addition to my information on the Miccolis sisters.  Back in December of 2009 I digitized one side of a transcription disc. It was a recording of two girls playing amazingly fast country guitar and yodeling in perfect harmony. You can hear it here. Later on I was lucky enough to speak with Ruth Miccolis, now known by her married name, Ruth Williams.  She's still performing locally in Kansas. More here. I have been trying for some time to collect her scant few sides on DeLuxe records. I have only found a few so far.  They are somewhat rare apparently.

Above is a promo card of some kind for 630 KXOK-AM in St. Louis. The branding is "Blue Network."  This is the only clue to the age of the bi-fold ad. But we already know that the Miccolis sisters were only on KXOK from 1947 to 1949. The intersection with the NBC Blue Network doesn't narrow that down at all.The other artists listed on the back flap Ambrose Haley, Dickie Phillips, and Joey Ross don't help either. Haley was there prior to the sisters, and left with them in 1949 for WIBW-AM. Phillips, Roberts and Ross are too obscure to be of any use. Ross had moved to KFAB in Lincoln, NE by 1947 lining up with the other dates. Curley Roberts had his own a minor career but no new information there either. For research purposes I scanned their bios in high res below. 

Transcription Mystery Disc #77

I almost never shell out more than junk-shop prices for transcription recordings. But this one spoke to me. In transferring it I applied a slightly heavier filter than usual. This did produce faint artifacts, but the vocals are so amazing that I really wanted them to be clear enough to discern how fast they are actually singing.The Miccolis Sisters were two sisters from a set of 11 children. Mary and Ruth Miccolis were born in 1922 and 1924 respectively. They became country yodelers of some renown at least regionally in the midwest. They were not bumpkins, they were city girls born right in Melrose Park, a Chicago suburb.

In 1938 they won a local talent show called the Rubins Hour which led to an audition for KMOX. That played out well despite the fact that the older of the two was only 16. At KMOX, they began singing harmonies for Pappy Cheshire's group on he Barnyard Follies show and The Old Fashioned Barn Dance show. They also played on the Ozark varieties Program which was syndicated on CBS. The program was sponsored by Dick Slack's Furniture Co. In 1946 They got their own program sponsored by Grove Quinine tablets.

In 1947, Ambrose Haley invited the sisters to perform on his program at the St. Louis Star-Times owned KXOK. This programming was syndicated on the NBC Blue Network. Working with Haley paid off, when Haley got an offer of a job at WIBW in Topeka, All three of them moved to Topeka and joined the Ozark Ramblers playing the Kansas Roundup Program.When he left in 1949 for WREN they stayed on.

They recorded 8 sides for DeLuxe, and two for King. I've only ever seen one of them and none of them are still in print anywhere, anyhow. They also had a songbook with twenty some songs worth of sheet music. This transcription is from a live broadcast, and the Song is the CowBoy Yodel, a song not in the DeLuxe catalog meaning that until now, it's never really been heard by anyone. That's a damn shame.

**************** UPDATE****************

I managed to Contact Ruth Miccolis now married as Ruth Williams. She is still with us and still performing. I hope to collect her few sides and provide her with digitized versions of her catalog. Please contact me if you can be of assistance.

Paul Harvey: The Last DJ

Paul Harvey died Saturday at the age of 90 at a hospital near his winter home in Phoenix. In the year 2000 ABC renewed his program for another 10 years; a vote of confidence at the end of a radio that lasted over 70 years. He was the last DJ in America older than radio itself. He was born in 1918, three years before the first commercial radio license.

His program "News & Comment" began on ABC in 1951, his other "The Rest of the Story" began in 1976. He began at KVOO a radio station in his home town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He briefly worked at KSAL in Salina, KS, KOMA in Oklahoma City, KFBI in Abilene, Kansas and KXOK in St. Louis. In 1941, He became program director for WKZO in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

But a year later he moved to Chicago for a gig at WENR Chicago. It was there that his 10 p.m. newscast became the top-rated program and his real career began. It is rumored that Paul Harvey Jr. may take over the program.

Top 40 begins

The vile radio recipe we call CHR is a direct descendant of Top 40 radio. Top 40 has largely gone the way of the dodo fully replaced by CHR. In evolution when two species compete for the same resources, one eventually has to eat the other.

Top 40 can actually be traced very directly to one man Todd Storz. Storz was heir to the Storz family fortune, from the Storz Brewing Company. In 1940s they were the most popular beer in Nebraska. You have never heard of them because they brewery closed in 1972 after selling out to some drunks in Minneapolis. Point being, the boy had some cash on hand. He wasn't just a rich kid though. Before 660 KOWH-AM, Todd had already worked at KBON-AM as an announcer and for Station KFAB-AM in sales.

Todd owned of KOWH-AM in Omaha with his father Robert H. Storz. You'll see some confusing accounts because he and his father are both named Robert Storz. When Time magazine wrote about him in 1956 and called him "the fasted rising figure in U.S. radio." They called him R. Todd Stortz. They made top 40 sound like crap. The article is well worth reading.

"Storz... allows his stations only 60 records at a time, lets them play only the 40 top tunes of the week, well larded with commercials."

The legend is that in 1954 Todd and his assistant Bill Stewart were at a bar across the street from KOWH-AM in Omaha and he noticed that it's patrons played the same songs over and over. Something clicked in his head He decided that popularity could be measured, and that repetition was key. Storz has told the story a few times, a few different ways. A less popular version has the bar near or on an army base in WWII -same realization, just a little earlier.

Regardless of when or where, I believe the venue. Before that moment, radio stations still used block programming, and a full-service structure reigned. A single station might play Classical, hillbilly, gospel news, and radio dramas in the same day. Here, a machine indicated preference like a ballot box. Todd thought the jukebox was closer to what people wanted to hear.

One documentary completely discards the anecdote and says that in 1950 the University of Omaha performed radio research that indicated that listeners tuned into radio mostly for the music. It more broadly says that Storz was also influenced shows as Your Hit Parade and Lucky Lager Dance Time, programs that already had repetition and rotation. I don't see the theories as mutually exclusive. A programmer can read research and still have a separate eureka moment. Today we take ad nauseum repetition as a given in radio. At the time it was a novelty. His application of it as a format was definitely a first and we know exactly where that happened.

Stortz bought KOWH-AM, a daytimer in 1949. In 1954 Todd took over as PD and launched his brazen new format. It was not rock radio. The mix was simply whatever was popular, there was no loyalty of any kind. they played instrumentals. novelty tunes, pop hits whatever topped the jukebox. I should also note that Gordon McLendon also gets some credit for the invention of Top 40. But he's a Texan, and in Texas they teach that Texans invented and founded everything. McLendon was a great radioman who had many firsts, but Top 40 wasn't one of them.

Todd Storz's died suddenly of a a cerebral hemorrhage, at age 39, in 1964. Todd was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1987. 660 AM in Omaha today is KCRO-AM a poorly rated Christian talker.